Skein News

Duchess School's School Experience Teams

Duchess School’s School Experience Teams (SETS) which meet every other week as cross departmental learning groups to explore together experiments with approaches to tackling School Improvement priorities and plan the next cycle of trying things out. SETs are led by volunteers who with their deputies are trained in depth in facilitating such work by the SLT member with responsibility for CPD. 

Castle School’s very interesting approach to taking an overview of CPD.

Each year the senior leadership team consider together over the course of a full day and in detail, not just the performance of every colleague, but also their confidence and capacity to learn. The resulting analysis is thus the springboard for the next year’s CPD offer.

The North-East gets Skeined!

Skein assessors have a very intense few days ahead of them as they set off for Northumbria to take four schools through the SKEIN assessment process.
A group of secondary schools are making use of the Skein process individually but also with parts of the process undertaken collectively.
Good luck to everyont involved - should be interesting and challenging in equal measure!

Wolves School of Education joins the Skein partnership

CUREE is delighted to announce that the School of Education at Wolverhampton University has become the first organisationto join as a Skein local delivery partner.

The School of Education is highly successful - Ofsted has graded both its primary and secondary provision as outstanding and is one of the top teacher training institutions in the country. Their close association with the Black Country Childrens' Services Improvement Partnership (BCCSIP) further augments their capacity to provide high quality professional development support.

CUREE has an established partnership with the School and has jointly undertaken large scale research with them We look forward to working even more closely with them in the future.

 

See a summary report

The full benchmark report contains a lot of helpful detail alongside a straightforward executive summary.

Here you can see a simplifed easy-to-read summary in chart form of the key findings from a real (primary) school report.

Got some questions? Find the answers here

We have talked to a lot of people now as they make use of the Skein service and we are beginning to get a good idea of the most common questions which arise. The Skein FAQ is where we try to answer those questions. The list grows everyday so keep looking. And if have a question you can't find the answer to, let us know and we'll try to help - and add it to the FAQ if others are likely to want to know the same thing.

See Philippa explaining Skein

New short video sequence in which Philippa Cordingley explains:

  • how Skein benefits schools;
  • the evidence base which underpins it
  • how it is organised to support school improvement efficiently and at modest cost
Pathfinder success

The Head of Rokeby School in Rugby, one of our Skein pathfinder schools, affirms the value of the process.

"We valued the recommendations about how, by building on our ongoing school improvement work and making small changes to existing mechanisms and structures, we could significantly strengthen our CPD and have better evidence for evaluating its impact on our staff and pupils"

 

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Welcome to Skein

 

"The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers"

 

This statement, quoted in McKinsey's 2007 report on the world's best performing schools systems, captures a truth solidly supported by evidence.

Skein's mission is to support school leaders determined to ensure that they are effectively developing their staff to support the school's drive to excellence. Skein:

  • Creates a coherent CPD approach across your school, cluster, alliance or system which models, and so reinforces, effective learning approaches for staff and for pupils
  • Develops your in-school CPD capacity and reduces your dependency on external providers
  • Gives you the information you need to make strategic decisions about professional learning goals and needs 

Click here to find out more - or choose a topic from the menu on the left.


“We really appreciate the depth of the report and what we are able to draw from it. No-one has ever engaged with us in this depth before.”  - Melanie Warnes - Head of Castle School


Click here to read Philippa Cordingley's article 'Evaluating the impact and quality of CPD; the role of research based benchmarks'.